I am a MA/MBA candidate at the Lauder Institute and the Wharton School of Business. I focus on Russian politics, economics, and demography but also write more generally about Eastern Europe. Please note that all opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone and that I do not speak in an official capacity for Lauder, Wharton, Forbes or any other organization.
I do my best to inject hard numbers (and flashy Excel charts) into conversations and debates that are too frequently driven by anecdotes. In addition to Forbes I've written for True/Slant, INOSMI, Salon, the National Interest, The Moscow Times, Russia Magazine, the Washington Post, and Quartz.
I frequently make pronouncements of great importance on Twitter @MarkAdomanis. Compliments? Complaints? Job offers? Please feel free to e-mail me at RussiaHand@gmail.com

The Martyrdom of John Derbyshire and the Brewing Conflict in the Conservative Movement

I know it’s a bit outside my wheelhouse, but the spectacle of John Derbyshire’s dismissal is too interesting and too politically significant for me to refrain from commenting.

In one of the more stunning instances of a pundit’s self-immolation that you will ever see, John Derbyshire has been fired from National Review. His firing comes after he wrote an article for the somewhat more downmarket and excitable Taki’s Magazine that was so cartoonishly and petulantly racist that it is hard not to view its publication as part of a deliberate attempt to force his exit from older and more august of the two publications (I’m not trying to be snide or dismissive, I don’t particularly care for either NR or for Taki’s Mag, but I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to note that NR editorial standards are, objectively speaking, somewhat more exacting).

It utterly baffles me how, in this day and age, anyone, even the most obtuse or egotistical, could possibly think that you would not be put out to pasture for authoring such a humorless, ill-informed, poorly written, and sophomoric screed about the mortal peril that white and Asian children face from African Americans. Plenty of other conservative authors have “gone there” on topics related to race: National Review’s editor Rich Lowry recently wrote an editorial about the Trayvon Martin killing and then followed it up with a blog post bemoaning the fact he had been labeled a bigot for speaking out. Other conservative authors, such as Andrew Sullivan and Derbyshire himself in days past, have even repeatedly treaded on the extremely fraught and contentious grounds of innate racial differences in intelligence. No, what made Derbyshire’s piece so unusual, and what resulted in his summary dismissal, was not the fact that it dealt with race but that it did so in a uniquely bullheaded and crass way: it wasn’t a racist dog whistle so much as it was an out-of-tune racist marching band.

Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

This is as baldly racist a statement as is possible to imagine, despite another National Review columnist’s feeble protestations that “there are no such things any more as overtly recognized racial smears.” Derbyshire is literally suggesting that people use one, exacting and demanding, standard when judging the acceptability of black politicians and that they use another, far less exacting, standard when judging white politicians. That is we should use different, and racially-determined, standards to judge the behavior of blacks and whites. That is, basically, the dictionary definition of racism or as least close to it as you’re ever likely to see in print. This statement, far more than any of Derbyshire’s arguments about the inadvisability of acting like a good Samaritan to a black person in “apparent distress” or the desirability of avoiding amusement parks with large concentrations of blacks, was what really stood out as demented and perverse because it wasn’t even sugar-coated with a patina of “fact” but was just naked and totally undisguised bigotry.

What is really important about this episode though is not that it demonstrates that conservatives have a tough time talking about race. That has been pretty obvious for a very long time now and I’m quite sure, years from now, some other conservative opinion writer will be canned after publishing a particularly ill-advised screed. No, what gives Derbyshire’s martyrdom much broader political relevance and significance is the light it casts on a large and growing divide within the conservative movement between the self-appointed elite and the base.

This is a complicated divide that has all shorts of overtones, particularly those related to class and educational attainment, but at a very basic level it is about branding. Those in the leadership positions, like Lowry, understand that, to be effective in 21st century America, conservatism absolutely cannot afford to appear hateful, backwards, provincial, and reactionary: it would be too politically toxic and destructive. Specifically related to race, there must be a constant refrains of “equal opportunity for all” and any expressions of outright bigotry have to be swiftly condemned and punished to mitigate their political cost. This is a worldview which, broadly speaking, understands that American society has changed and that open racism is no longer acceptable. Those on the other side of the elite-mass divide, tend to regard the main problem with the conservative movement as its constant appeasement and cowardice: they think that people like Derbyshire aren’t being hateful and stupid but are instead speaking bold and inconvenient truths that those in power would rather ignore. These people are angry beyond belief that fearless writers like Derbyshire are being unfairly marginalized by “wimps” like Rich Lowry (one of the most constant insults you will see hurled at establishment conservatives is “girly man”) and regard any attempts to police conservative discourse as revolting attempts to “appease” liberals.**

I am far from the only person to notice the increasingly yawning divide between professional conservative functionaries and the flock they purport to lead, and I am certainly not attempting to portray myself as uniquely clairvoyant or perspicacious for doing so. Indeed if you go and look through actual conservative blogs it is virtually impossible to miss the wave of righteous indignation, often bordering on blind rage, that has been stirred up by Derbyshire’s dismissal and the supposedly cowardly and obsequious way it was handled by National Review (heck, I’m not a conservative and even I got yelled at by a couple of random people on Twitter). If you have a strong stomach and a relatively well-developed immunity to illogic I would strongly advise that you examine, for example, the over 2500(!) comments that Derbyshire’s piece attracted, the comments that were left on National Review,* the comments on Steve Sailer’s blog, the comments on Robert Stacey McCain’s blog, and, to a lesser extent, the comments on this Dan Riehl piece and even a few of the comments left on the Village Voice post to which I linked earlier.

Just so that I am perfectly clear the content of these comments is not remotely interesting (they are sterling examples of people making the bog-standard mistake of mistaking “colorful anecdotes” with “persuasive data”) but their sheer number, and the extent to which they greatly outweigh the number of comments which expressed approval over Derbyshire’s dismissal, does seem to be worthy of note. There is, of course, a certain amount of self-selection going on, trolls always come out of the woodwork during such episodes, but I think it’s pretty apparent that there is a genuine disconnect between conservative leaders and the led and that this anger is very close to boiling over.

Despite the appearance of uniformity, the conservative movement is riven with myriad tensions and internal contradictions. The disagreement over how to handle matters of race is one of the more contentious issues, but is hardly unique in this regard (immigration is probably the worst, but gay marriage is not far behind). The leaders of the movement have, truth be told, done an absolutely masterful job papering over these tensions and enforcing discipline, but I think the system is in the midst of a slow-motion collapse. Thanks to the magic of social media, it becomes ever more difficult to effectively banish non-conformists and ever harder to present a united front. This is the real importance of the Derbyshire affair, and something that is worth remembering far after the media circus has died down.

Lastly, on a more personal note, it only seems fair to note that John Derbyshire is in the midst of a battle against cancer and that it would be not just churlish but barbaric to take any sort of pleasure in his dismissal. I think the man’s views in this instance were appalling, but he deserves no small bit of sympathy for what he is going through. Everyone ought to remember that before celebrating

* Lowry wisely decided to close comments on the actual notice of Derbyshire’s dismissal

** I am not (let me repeat not) arguing that the conservative base is uniformly racist. Far from it. But the conservative base does have a much higher tolerance for harsh rhetoric provided that that rhetoric comes from other conservatives. This “us versus them” mentality is very much a basic part of human psychology, but does seem to be particularly well developed among contemporary American conservatives who will countenance almost any sort of conduct provided the person is part of their team.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

A pity Derbyshire wasn’t smart enough to make bigot generalizations about Arab-americans and moslems generally, questiontheir loyalty specifically, or ortherwise cast them as eveil wolfs eager toattack the unspecting flocks of american and Isrealis lambs.

As conservative born and raised in the post segregation south I found most of what Derb said more in line with what my grand parents would have said to my parents than what I would say to my children.

I will say that there is a problem in our culture that is compounded by the favoritism that blacks find in the liberal establishment through affirmative action and out right favoritism. The admonition of Derb to scrutinize black pols, I believe, has to do with the fact that liberal black pols are given less scrutiny by the media in general and therefore are capable of doing getting away with more.

I am sorry to see him leave NRO. I didn’t agree with everything he said but I did/do appreciate the antiseptic voice with which he told things as he saw them. Coming across, at least to me as a good prosecutor, without passion or prejudice.

And as usual the old liberal trope, which thoroughly saturates this piece, that “race realism” is coterminous with “racism.”

The only questionable piece of advice in the piece was the one suggesting that black politicians need closer scrutiny than whites. Otherwise, everything is in line with any amount of objective real world data such as IQ tests, academic proficiency tests, crime statistics, etc. Discrimination has lost any explanatory power it might once have had thanks to affirmative action.

With a few exceptions like Robert Lindsay, the liberals on this issue are as close-minded and dishonest as conservatives tend to be on AGW.

It’s not so much a case of being a “truth vigilante” as having a basic appreciation for honesty. It’s easy to bring out the Racist card but framing coherent counter-arguments against the masses of evidence for what you call “race theory” is much more difficult.

You’re correct on the toughness part, though, given the essentially Lysenkoist attitudes of almost all liberals on this topic.